Hello, and welcome to another edition of Bitch-and-Moan-fest. I'll be your hostess, since it seems I am on my way to becoming an expert on that. Not that I like to bitch, mind you (which, I know, you find hard to believe based on that probably at least half of my entries have some form of bitching about something in them), it's just that it seems there is always so much crap to bitch about.
Maybe it's me. Maybe I am just looking at the glass as totally empty, and I need to just adjust my thinking so as to view it as having at least a drop or two in the bottom. But not today. Today, I need a good old fashioned bitch session.
Note: In today's edition, the word "fuck" will no longer be cutsily disguised by the Webdings font, i.e., the previous fuck shall now = fuck; I raise this point in the unlikely event that there are those who haven't yet figured out what fuck is.
And since Webdings are at least temporarily halted... Personal to Crystal: Every time I go through Duncanfuckingville, I wonder: Is it still dry? (That simply would not have been the same with Webdings in the middle; not that anyone else will get that)
Moving along.
Today is every bit another Monday the 13th following an exhausting, frustrating, worrysome etc. weekend. I had a monster of a headache this morning, worse than most, but this time I attribute at least part of it to 6 hours total sleep over the past 2 nights, along with at that time still not knowing wtf was going on.
Oh, excuse me. As long as we are not using Webdings, we won't be abbreviating "what the fuck", either.
Additionally, I received the tragic news this morning that Dr. Wonderful is no longer at the medical office I see her at, and I have no idea where to find her. I finally find a doctor I like (and not just because she prescribed me good stuff) and now she is gone. Fuck.
Anyway. By "still not knowing what the fuck was going on", I mean - until this morning we had not heard from Phillip since last Tuesday. Which is not like him at all. Occasionally he will miss a night calling, but often then he will call the next morning. Never has he gone even 2 days in a row without calling (unless it was near the end of the month and he was out of phone minutes).
I was puzzling over this on Friday, and when his calling cut-off time of 10:00 rolled around on Friday night and still no call, I got really worried. I decided on Saturday morning that if we didn't hear from him some time that day, I was heading out for a Sunday visit. In the meantime, Mama had picked up the kid on Friday and taken her to Oklahoma. When we didn't get a call on Saturday, my mom said she was going with me. We knew Phillip would be disappointed we didn't bring the kid, but there wasn't anything we could do about that.
Don't ask me why - in hindsight, it should have been more obvious - but in all of our discussions and ponderings and speculations about the reason(s) Phillip hadn't called, we never dreamed that if he couldn't call, he couldn't have visitors.
You guessed it. At 7:52 a.m. on Sunday, 5 1/2 hours and 335 miles after we set out at 2:20 a.m., we learned that the whole facility was on "lockdown", and there was no visitation and no one there could call out. It had been that way since Wednesday. They could offer no other information, and said that we should have called before we came.
Excuse me? And we knew that how, exactly? I have poured through the visiting guidelines and regulations numerous times, as has my mom, and neither of us ever saw a thing in there about the possibility of a lockdown and that we should call before we visit. That's because that information isn't fucking in there. It would have been good to know sooner that in the event that we don't hear from him for days, odds are there's a lockdown, and oh, by the way, call before you bother to drive 700 miles round trip to visit to see what's going on, cuz you can't, and to top it off, you don't get to know anything about what might be going on inside this place to cause such a long lockdown and whether or not your loved one is all right.
Note I have previously attempted to call facilities on the weekends for information . Seeing as how we always leave at 2:00 a.m. Sunday morning, we would have to call on Friday and hope nothing changes, because you simply can't get a person on the phone on the weekends.
Usually. Once we were given the information about no visiting and to call first, we went back to the car and I got their phone number. I called... and got a person on the phone, who confirmed there would be no visitation at all through the weekend.
Of course, who knows if they normally answer the phone on the weekends. I mean, they did have all of those guards who would normally work the visiting just sitting around with probably little to do that day except, say, answer the phone.
Gee. Sure, our useless trip there was not an intentional screwing with us on their part. But coupled with that experience, there is this one guy who screens the visitors who is very good at screwing with people intentionally. Everyone who visits knows it, and some talk about it very vocally in the waiting room while the rest of us wish they would shut up so as not to tick the guy off even more. 2 weeks ago when we visited there was even a lady trying to get everyone to sign some sort of petition against the guy. Um, good luck with that, lady. I'd love to sign it, as I'm sure would everyone else, but we don't dare. We don't want him to screw with us even worse than he's already going to when it gets to be our turn. Another lady tried to tell petition lady that it wouldn't do any good because she had already written to the warden about the guy and got no response.
That is what was even more frustrating about not being able to visit yesterday. It seems it's always something whenever we come. Yes, this was certainly by far the worst, but it is always something.
Actually, I was very good until now. After the last visit, I was so ticked I fully intended to bitch about it here -- and there, and everywhere, but decided ultimately it would probably be better not to since I send Phillip all of my blog entries to read and of course their mail is screened, and it hadn't done the other lady any good to complain to the warden and I am sure she is not the only one who already has. Now, however, between the previous experiences and this weekend, I am too fucking ticked to care. Can you fucking tell?
So... In case anyone working at the facility who is reading/screening/censoring the mail is interested in looking into the problem (which I doubt but hey, there are kind people out there), it won't be difficult for you to find out who this one guy is. Ask anyone who visited the same day we did last time. He's the guy who made sure that as many people visiting as possible had to wait until after the count was over to get back to the visiting room. We signed in at 8:40. We finally got back there at 11:00 and I think Phillip came out 15 minutes after that. Since visiting ends at 3:00, our visit was not even as long as our drive one-way. Of course, we were more fortunate than the people who got in with 4 minutes left. That's right, 4 minutes.
There were not that many people visiting - we and a lot of others could have gotten back there a lot sooner. This one guy finds something wrong with at least 1 person in every group, and then he will not move on to whoever is next while the previous offender is changing clothes/taking stuff to the car/correcting their form/fixing whatever the problem is. He waited 15 minutes for a lady to go to her car twice and change her pants. Didn't screen anybody else in the meantime, just waited on her. As he does every time.
That's why we were so excited this Sunday to get there at 7:52. You can sign in beginning at 8:00. Oh, boy! We were going to be first, definitely among the first ones in, no wasting 2 1/2 to 3 hours of our visiting time in the waiting room.
Not this time.
Funny thing. Their reading material for visitors says: "The BOP (Bureau of Prisons) encourages visiting to help inmates maintain morale and ties with family members, friends, and others in the community."
Well you could have fooled me.
This one guy's attitude is not that of one that encourages visiting. I understand they have to carefully screen visitors to be sure they're not bringing in things they shouldn't be, etc. I certainly don't want people bringing things in they shouldn't be. I'm told now that the reason for this lockdown was because an inmate attacked a guard, and once they subdued him and searched him, they found a knife. Please please please, screen us visitors for knives and other dangerous contraban. It's bad enough Phillip has to be in there, I want him to be safe. But this one guy could do his job properly without going out of his way to be a jerk. Others do.
On 2 occasions we have visited and this one guy either wasn't there or wasn't in charge of the lobby. Our experiences then were reasonable and much more pleasant. We waited a reasonable time once as others were processed efficiently ahead of us, and once we didn't have to wait at all. We had no difficulties. We know the drill, what and what not to wear, do, and bring, and we heard no complaints from any of the other visitors about the process on those occasions.
In other words, those two experiences were the exact opposite of when this one guy is working. This one guy makes the situation for everyone visiting almost intolerable. I really think that's what he is striving for. I think he doesn't believe these guys deserve anything good, like visitors, and he's trying to be as discouraging to those of us going through the visiting process as he can. Fortunately the other employees we encounter there are for the most part quite nice. (Well, except maybe for the ones we encountered yesterday who seemed just a little pleased to tell us there was no visiting, and that one guy was not even among them.)
Don't worry, Phillip. Try though he may, this one guy will never make the process intolerable enough to stop us from visiting. And neither will the lack of some pretty necessary information in the visiting guide, i.e., call before you go.
Of course, if I have any sense at all, Phillip will never read this entry, because I won't send it to him. But then, who ever said I have any sense?
I do have the sense to have their phone number stored in my cell phone now though. Do you suppose they answer the phone at 2:00 a.m.?
Ok, now, in my first attempt to view the glass as having any water in it whatsoever... we did at least get to buy some Powerball tickets while in Louisiana. It's up to $75 million you know. Boy, wouldn't that be something. $75 million. I guess I'd have very little to bitch about then, huh? And of course, what a great story that would be - why we were in Louisiana buying tickets in the first place.
Dare to dream.
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